Anesthetize
by ncfan
Summary: -Mikoto, Itachi- This is how she numbs her heart.


**Characters**: Mikoto, Itachi**  
Summary**: This is how she numbs her heart.**  
Pairings**: None**  
Author's Note**: Have to wonder what's going through Mikoto's mind as she watches Itachi grow apart from his family.**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Naruto.

* * *

_I am kunoichi. I will be strong._

Mikoto taps her finger on the window of her soul to break through and pour liquid morphine all over it, to put it to sleep so she can't feel anything when she looks into the dull and dying eyes of her elder son.

A dull light that was tarnished once spilled from Itachi, having been at the outset a bright beacon. Now, it's gone, and Mikoto can guess what has taken it.

The words roll in her mind… _Duty to the village, ANBU's due, the drain of missions left and right, what the village takes it never returns, not even when you're dead… _and Mikoto understands. The village will always take too much, cruelly so, and demand more out of the Uchiha than anyone else, because of what they are.

Demand more, because they are the best. Demand the most, because they are those whom the powers that be assume would betray them at the first opportunity. There is no better solution, they reason, for the threat of insurrection than to ride the would-be betrayers until there is nothing left of them. Mikoto has seen it done to a thousand others, many children—so why would Konoha have any compunction for Itachi, who is a child still if only in body, and whom they destroy?

Her initial reaction when she realizes is neither dignified nor pretty. This is _her_ child, the creature and issue of her flesh. A vessel that Mikoto had previously thought untouchable—she had been foolish enough to believe that Konoha would never have her or hers.

How wrong she had been, she comprehends at the sight of Itachi's eyes, dull as pebbles, as the blade on an old and unpolished kunai, and knows why instantly—_after all, she _has_ seen it a thousand times before._

Her heart threatens to spill and break at first, and her words bleed into the ether with their pain, their anger, their hurt.

Sasuke watches uncomprehendingly. He is a child, he is an innocent, and like all the innocent he is blind—he can not see the suffering that is beyond his comprehension.

Fugaku is hardly what anyone could call gentle. He shakes his head and all but calls her an imbecile as he speaks to her in the manner one would use on a mule-headed child, explaining _exactly why_ Mikoto will say nothing to the government and make no attempts to stop what has been initiated.

And she does not listen, until Itachi looks up at her (he's still shorter than her, still shorter, for all that he is a killer, a boy made into a weapon), and merely whispers,

"_I will be alright, Okaasan. There is no need to worry for me."_

Only Itachi's skin still belongs to him—Konoha has claimed everything else—and it's that skin Mikoto sees every time he mouths empty words that have been fed to him on the edge of a blade. Itachi says only what the village wants him to say, says it to comfort his mother out a vestigial sense of familial loyalty that Mikoto knows will soon be extinguished, as is all else.

For all that she still sees her baby, he's not really her son anymore.

He is Konoha's perfect vessel.

Mikoto can't get the image out of her head—_Itachi with blank, dull eyes; Itachi forming words that aren't his; Konoha speaking through him; Itachi not seeming the child who would always come to her anymore_—and it's in the process of threatening to eat her alive, taking exploratory bites at her flesh.

And this is where Mikoto draws out the anesthesia and puts it into her body on the edge of a knife.

There is nothing she can do. The fire has already been extinguished.

At least her heart, numbed to his presence, will still be strong, so that two boys, one that still belongs to Mikoto and one that does not, will still have a mother when the sun goes down over the trees and the hills and the walls of the compound, that blocks out the village—

—But has been breached, by the parasite placed in the cavity of Itachi's chest, where his heart used to be.


End file.
